[Analysis of the true death-rate due to alcoholism (author's transl)]

For various administrative and technical/registrational reasons, statistics on the death rate of chronic alcoholism are wrong. Exact studies have shown that official figures have to be multiplied by a factor of between 45 and 69 to arrive at the true rate. If one also takes into consideration the reduction in the collective life expectancy, the factor increases to about 100. The common practice of identifying death due to alcoholism by equating it with the number of deaths due to cirrhosis of the liver, provides a figure which is too low for the Central European area. Various suggestions are made on how to obtain the true death-rate.